Pingdom, the website uptime and monitoring company, has just become a Local Internet Registry (LIR), meaning it has been assigned a block of IP addresses. They join 468 other registries in Sweden, of which the largest are Internet Service Providers, academic institutions, and other enterprises that assign most of its block of IP addresses to its customers. Becoming a LIR fits into Pingdom's plans of updating and replacing all of its infrastructure in 2012.

Recent IFPI report on digital music reveals the size of Spotify in Europe and how much money it's actually churning for the record labels. The report also stated that on a European level, Spotify is the second single largest source of digital music revenue for record labels. This means that 2010 saw dramatic increase in its usage as well as payouts to record labels and artists themselves.

Swedish startup Anyfi Networks has come out of stealth mode and announced Anyfi.net, a new Wi-Fi roaming solution. The solution allows Internet service providers (ISP) offer consumers the same automatic Wi-Fi user experience both at home and on the go - users can automatically and securely always connect to the same Wi-Fi access point.

The solution is based on a custom piece of software ISP can install (automatically over-the-air in most cases) into their Wi-Fi hotspot devices, to make the hotspots function as a radio gateway (or access point). The access points direct the raw Wi-Fi radio traffic securely over the Internet to a server in the cloud.

This way, when connecting to a hotspot where Anyfi.net software is installed, users will always be virtually in their home network, without having to login to any new local Wi-Fi network (no passwords are asked after the very first login to the home network). This means the users will also have a fully secured connection, even if the hotspot itself would be untrusted or even in an attacker's control. The solution is also very simple for the end users, as it does not require installation of any new software to the consumers' devices, thus working on any Wi-Fi client device (like smartphone) out-of-the-box. Check out the video below for more info.